Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Occasional poetry as the highest poetry is an idea worth keeping in mind, though it is a daunting ideal in this time of supercommunication and superweapons, when, whether we like it or not, and whether or not we like one another, all occasions include us all. At any rate it is an idea that serves as an antidote to the defensive definition of poetry as anti-prose—a hermetic art. I’d like to see that definition neutralized, because when people take it seriously it not only mandarinizes poetry but narrows and lowers the expectations and standards for the writing of novels, screenplays, descriptions of baseball games and remote galaxies, and so on, all of which should surely be in free communication and having intercourse in every sense of the word all the time with poetry.

  All the same, all the same, there is a difference … isn’t there? In the work, not the worker, says Shelley. “The distinction between poets and prose writers,” he says in the Defense of Poetry, “is a vulgar error.”6 Now, there’s a man who swatted Philosophy Teachers like flies.

  The distinction Shelley makes is between

  measured and unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.

  Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order.7

  It is a difficult passage. I understand it to say that the measure—not the meter, which he specifically dismisses as accidental—the measure, what Gary Snyder calls rhythm, is the expression of the relations of sounds and of thoughts among themselves and to one another: the perception of a larger order in which sounds and ideas move together: word-music. This certainly does not (and he says that it does not) define poetry and prose as different things, for prose could have its own proper, looser rhythms and measures. But Shelley goes on to talk about translation:

  Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.8

  Scientists do cast violets into crucibles and discover the principles of their color and odor. Shelley did not say it was impossible; he said it was unwise. We also translate poetry. And here, with the metaphor of translation, I think I can finally get at what has been worrying me all along.

  A poem is its words. It may be recreated in a different language, but then it is a new poem, a new plant, as Shelley says, sprung from the idea-seed of the old one. You cannot change the words and still have the poem. This is inarguable. But it is also an inarguable fact that many poets delight in translating poetry and many readers delight in translations: I call John Keats to witness, Chapman’s Homer in hand.

  This is a bit of a paradox, but worse, it leads back to the blonde-brunette fallacy. Nobody even tries to argue that prose can’t be translated. Everybody knows it can. Everybody who can read the original and compare the translation knows what gets lost in translation, and writhes and groans and shouts, How could the stupid ass miss that! … But still, most of us here read War and Peace in one of the variously inadequate and (we are told) inept translations, and we talk about it quite as if in fact we had read War and Peace, and I think we are right to do so. But is a novel not its words, then?

  If not, what is it?

  There is not, nor ever was, a Real Natasha; nor is the Napoleon of War and Peace the Real Napoleon; far from it. He is Tolstoy’s invention, and a good thing too. But then, what is a novel, if not a web of words? Ideas? Is a novel all ideas? Far from it, and a good thing too. But let us call the emotions and perceptions and complex apprehensions aroused by a novel “ideas,” since nobody seems to know what else to call them. Well, then, are words and ideas so easily separable in prose? Does an ineffable yet durable idea-ness exist, a Shelleyan idea-seed, a soul, immaterial yet capable of being trans-lated, of being brought across the gap between two languages/cultures/ages, and fitted into a new and totally different word-body, without itself undergoing any substantial change or loss? This is metempsychosis—reincarnation. I believe it because I see it happen, but I don’t understand it, because I also believe that a novel, just as much as a poem, is its words.

  Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the act of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat … where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches. To bring something across, one needs a boat; or a bridge; what bridge? The metaphors all self-destruct. I am left with the stubborn feeling that composition, whether of poetry or prose, is not all that different from translation. In translating you have a text of words to work from; in composing or creating you don’t; you have a text that is not words, and you find the words. That’s a difference, of course, but the job, getting the right words in the right order, getting the measure right, is the same. Feels the same.

  Perhaps this is why sometimes a lot of writers writing in different languages, in different countries, all seem to be going the same direction without communicating about it, like a flock of birds or fish, suddenly all doing the same new thing and understanding what the others are trying to do. They are all translating into their own idiom or idiolect from the same nonverbal text.

  It is also because of this that I feel that the area where Hymes, Tedlock, and others9 have been working—not abstract theories of translation but actual translations across the widest possible gaps, from an oral, performed text in the totally alien language of a radically different culture, into written English—that this is where something exciting is going on; this is one of the places where our literature is alive, unfixed, on the move, defying definition. What is this stuff? Is it spoken or written? Both. Is it narrative or ritual? Both. Is it poetry or prose? Both. That’s the sort of stuff I want to be able to compose myself. I want to learn how to make translations from the languages nobody knows, nobody speaks. The translations will not be as good as the originals, but then, they never are.

  Notes

  1. Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Act II, Scene 4 (my translation).

  2. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935), pp. 231–32.

  3. Huntington Brown, Prose Styles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 55.

  4. George Eliot, Silas Marner (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962), p. 140.

  5. Gary Snyder, The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964–1979 (New York: New Directions, 1980), p. 36.

  6. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry; Thomas Love Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry, ed. John E. Jordan (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Library of Liberal Arts, 1965), p. 34.

  7. Ibid., p. 33.

  8. Ibid.

  9. To anyone interested in pursuing this indication, I would recommend the following books and their rich bibliographies: Karl Kroeber, ed., Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981); Dell Hymes, “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Jarold Ramsay, Reading the Fire: Essays in Traditional Indian Literatures of the Far West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); and Brian Swann, ed., Smoothing t
he Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). See also “Text, Silence, Performance,” p. 182n, in this volume.

  A LEFT-HANDED COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

  (1983)

  I want to thank the Mills College Class of ’83 for offering me a rare chance: to speak aloud in public in the language of women.

  I know there are men graduating, and I don’t mean to exclude them, far from it. There is a Greek tragedy where the Greek says to the foreigner, “If you don’t understand Greek, please signify by nodding.” Anyhow, commencements are usually operated under the unspoken agreement that everybody graduating is either male or ought to be. That’s why we are all wearing these twelfth-century dresses that look so great on men and make women look either like a mushroom or a pregnant stork. Intellectual tradition is male. Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men’s language. Of course women learn it. We’re not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man’s world, so it talks a man’s language. The words are all words of power. You’ve come a long way, baby, but no way is long enough. You can’t even get there by selling yourself out: because there is theirs, not yours.

  Maybe we’ve had enough words of power and talk about the battle of life. Maybe we need some words of weakness. Instead of saying now that I hope you will all go forth from this ivory tower of college into the Real World and forge a triumphant career or at least help your husband to and keep our country strong and be a success in everything—instead of talking power, what if I talked like a woman right here in public? It won’t sound right. It’s going to sound terrible. What if I said what I hope for you is first, if—only if—you want kids, I hope you have them. Not hordes of them. A couple, enough. I hope they’re beautiful. I hope you and they have enough to eat, and a place to be warm and clean in, and friends, and work you like doing. Well, is that what you went to college for? Is that all? What about success?

  Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.

  Because you are human beings, you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself—as I know you already have—in dark places, alone, and afraid.

  What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

  Well, we’re already foreigners. Women as women are largely excluded from, alien to, the self-declared male norms of this society, where human beings are called Man, the only respectable god is male, and the only direction is up. So, that’s their country; let’s explore our own. I’m not talking about sex; that’s a whole other universe, where every man and woman is on their own. I’m talking about society, the so-called man’s world of institutionalized competition, aggression, violence, authority, and power. If we want to live as women, some separatism is forced upon us: Mills College is a wise embodiment of that separatism. The war-games world wasn’t made by us or for us; we can’t even breathe the air there without masks. And if you put the mask on you’ll have a hard time getting it off. So how about going on doing things our own way, as to some extent you did here at Mills? Not for men and the male power hierarchy—that’s their game. Not against men, either—that’s still playing by their rules. But with any men who are with us: that’s our game. Why should a free woman with a college education either fight Machoman or serve him? Why should she live her life on his terms?

  Machoman is afraid of our terms, which are not all rational, positive, competitive, etc. And so he has taught us to despise and deny them. In our society, women have lived, and have been despised for living, the whole side of life that includes and takes responsibility for helplessness, weakness, and illness, for the irrational and the irreparable, for all that is obscure, passive, uncontrolled, animal, unclean—the valley of the shadow, the deep, the depths of life. All that the Warrior denies and refuses is left to us and the men who share it with us and therefore, like us, can’t play doctor, only nurse, can’t be warriors, only civilians, can’t be chiefs, only indians. Well, so that is our country. The night side of our country. If there is a day side to it, high sierras, prairies of bright grass, we only know pioneers’ tales about it, we haven’t got there yet. We’re never going to get there by imitating Machoman. We are only going to get there by going our own way, by living there, by living through the night in our own country.

  So what I hope for you is that you live there not as prisoners, ashamed of being women, consenting captives of a psychopathic social system, but as natives. That you will be at home there, keep house there, be your own mistress, with a room of your own. That you will do your work there, whatever you’re good at, art or science or tech or running a company or sweeping under the beds, and when they tell you that it’s second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while they’re going to give you equal pay for equal time. I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

  ALONG THE PLATTE

  (1983)

  Some people fly to Tierra del Fuego and Katmandu; some people drive across Nebraska in a VW bus.

  Living in Oregon, with family in Georgia, we drive the United States corner to corner every now and then. It takes a while. On the fifth day out of Macon, just crossing the Missouri, we look up to see a jet trail in the big sky. That plane going west will do two thousand miles while we do two hundred. A strange thought. But the strangeness works both ways. We’ll drive about four hundred miles today. On foot with an ox-drawn wagon, that distance would take up to a month.

  These are some notes from a day and a half on the Oregon Trail.

  About ten in the morning we cross the wide Missouri into the West. Nebraska City looks comfortable and self-reliant, with its railyards and grain elevators over the big brown river. From it we drive out into rolling, spacious farmlands, dark green corn, pale yellow hay stubble, darkening gold wheat. The farmhouses, with big barns and a lot of outbuildings, come pretty close together: prosperous land. The signs say: Polled Shorthorns … Hampshire Swine … Charolais … Yorkshire and Spotted Swine.

  We cross the North Fork of the Little Nemaha. The rivers of America have beautiful names. What was the language this river was named in? Nemaha—Omaha—Nebraska … Eastern Siouan, I guess. But it’s a guess. We don’t speak the language of this country.

  Down in the deep shade of trees in high thick grass stand three horses, heads together, tails swishing, two black and one white with black tail and mane. Summertime …

  Around eleven we’re freewaying through Lincoln, a handsome city, the gold dome on its skyscraper capitol shining way up in the pale blue sky, and on our left the biggest grain elevator I ever saw, blocks long, a cathedral of high and mighty cylinders of
white. On KECK, Shelley and Dave are singing, “Santa Monica freeway, sometimes makes a country girl blue …” After a while the DJ does the announcements. There will be a State Guernsey Picnic on Saturday, if I heard right.

  Now we’re humming along beside the Platte—there’s a language I know. Platte means Flat. It’s pretty flat along the Platte, all right, but there are long swells in this prairie, like on the quietest sea, and the horizon isn’t forever: it’s a blue line of trees way off there, under the farthest line of puffball fair-weather clouds.

  We cross some channels of the braided Platte at Grand Island and stop for lunch at a State Wayside Park called Mormon Island, where it costs two bucks to eat your picnic. A bit steep. But it’s a pretty place, sloughs or channels of the river on all sides, and huge black dragonflies with silver wingtips darting over the shallows, and blue darning-needles in the grass. The biggest mosquito I ever saw came to eat my husband’s shoulder. I got it with my bare hand, but a wrecking ball would have been more appropriate. There used to be buffalo here. They were replaced by the mosquitoes.

  On along the Platte, which we’re going to cross and recross eleven times in Nebraska and one last time in Wyoming. The river is in flood, running hard between its grey willows and green willows, aspens and big cottonwoods. Some places the trees are up to their necks in water, and west of Cozad the hayfields are flooded, hayrolls rotting in the water, grey-white water pouring through fields where it doesn’t belong.